Music in vids: a little background

As mentioned in my last post, I've spent much of this spring reading about music and thinking about how what I'm reading might apply to vids. This post is some background about why I've been doing that.

As of right now, music is kind of the missing piece of research on vidding. Most of the academic work on vidding (including mine) has focused on the relationship between vids or vidders and TV shows or films. There are several reasons for this.

For one thing, most academics writing about vids are inclined to focus on the original text because that's the kind of background we have: literary studies, media studies. Seeing vids as a form of media criticism fits with what we've been trained to do. And, conveniently, it's also a way of justifying what we do when we're talking to colleagues who don't know anything about fandom: showing how fans are like academics makes fans much more interesting to academics.

But of course it's not just academics who focus on video rather than audio when talking about vids; it's fans, too: we talk about vidding particular shows or movies ("I'm vidding Sleepy Hollow for VVC Premieres"; "She makes the best Supernatural vids"). The very influential Mary Van Deusen referred to her creations as "literary song vids," as Henry Jenkins explains in Textual Poachers. The show is the thing we have something to say about.

And then there's a third thing: I think a fair amount of the work on vids in recent years has had a very pragmatic bent; we've been thinking about things like, for example, the DMCA hearings--which are about DVDs, not music.

Now, it's not like academics writing about vids don't mention that vids involve music. But we don't usually pay a lot of attention to vid songs, and when we do, it's typically to the lyrics rather than the music. In this way, vid scholars have been a lot like beginning vidders, who tend to focus on the visuals and the lyrics and take a while to start working with the music. (I facepalmed pretty hard when I realized that I was reproducing my own trajectory as a vidder, let me tell you.)

Vidders and vid fans know that song choice is important. But given how important we agree it is, there's actually been surprisingly little discussion of why it's important or how it works. In some ways, this reluctance to theorize is a community-building move, I think: the importance of song choice is one of the first principles of vidding fandom, and if you don't get it, you're not One Of Us.

But it's also true that music is just plain hard to talk about:

The very fact that theoreticians of classical filmic discourse, even those who write about the soundtrack, have slighted the specific uses of music in this cinema attests to the strength of music’s resistance to analysis. (Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music)

Music, more than any of the arts, is commonly thought to be somehow above and beyond rational analysis. (Andrew Goodwin, Dancing in the Distraction Factory: Music Television and Popular Culture)

But as I worked on the book, I just kept coming back to the importance of song choice, and I started trying to articulate why I think music is so important to vids. There are lots of answers, but the ones I'm currently working with are these:

1) Genre. No music, no vid.

2) Emotional effects. The music does most of the emotional heavy lifting in vids. (In this, vids are a lot like narrative film and TV, where music does a lot of the work of telling us what to feel about a scene.)

3) Structure. Vids are structured around music at both macro and micro levels. (In this, vids are the opposite of most narrative film and TV, where music is composed/chosen and edited to fit the visual narrative.)

4) Creative process. Song choice is important not just to the vid but to the vidder. For many of us, the song is what sparks a vid idea in the first place; in other cases, it's the thing that has to be found before the idea can get off the ground. It guides clipping, editing, and often the creation of effects. Think about it this way: pretty much any verb you can think of related to the creative processes of actually planning and making a vid (as opposed to technical stuff like exporting or uploading) is going to be related in some way to the song choice. And even where a given vidder is thinking more about the song's lyrics than its music, the whole point of songs is that the lyrics are welded to the music; they can never be completely disentangled.

So those are some of the key ideas and assumptions that I started out with when I began digging around in the fields of music and sound studies to see what I could find that might help me think through how I see music operating in vids themselves and in the way that vidders describe their creative processes.

There have certainly been music-related takedowns (and, more common of late, music-related monetization) on YouTube, and that's one of the reasons why more work on music in vids would be valuable: it would give pro-fandom intellectual property lawyers more to work with. But there have also been takedowns related to visual source (morgandawn linked to this example recently).

I wasn't actively involved in the initial legal strategizing around the quest for a DMCA exemption (the work for the 2009 exemption began in 2008), so I can't speak to that directly, but I can say that from my point of view the focus on video mattered not just because of YouTube takedowns but because of the larger legal landscape. The DMCA exemption was important partly because it was there--it was a venue in which to start to address legal issues around vids. And it was an important one because without it, fair use arguments didn't matter; vids were infringing from the get-go because they involved circumventing decryption. With that issue out of the way, we can focus on other things! As I am now happily doing. :)